The primary objective of the Community Engagement &Outreach Core of the proposed Center for Health Disparities, Research, Engagement, and Training (CeHDRET) is to engage African American and African immigrant communities in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, in efforts to improve minority health and reduce health disparities. The Community Engagement &Outreach Core has two specific aims:
Aim 1 : To establish a community-academic partnership that will provide a unifying and transformative organizational framework for improving minority health in the Twin Cities of Minnesota;
Aim 2 : To engage community partners from the local African American and African immigrant (Somali) communities in the dissemination of interventions to promote fruit and vegetable consumption and reduce tobacco use. Core activities, guided by the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), will be a collaborative effort among the University of Minnesota, the Stairstep Foundation (which has a coalition of 32 African American churches in the Twin Cities), and the Minnesota International Health Volunteers (MIHV).
For Aim 1, we will focus on the five key phases that define CBPR: partnership building, capacity building, needs assessment, community action plan (CAP) development, and CAP implementation and evaluation.
For Aim 2, we propose two activities. First, we will partner with the Stairstep Foundation to disseminate Body &Soul, an evidence-based program to promote fruits and vegetables consum ption in African Americans. Second, we will partner with MIHV to develop a culturally-targeted community-based intervention to reduce tobacco use in the Somali community. We also will work closely with the CeHDRET Research Training and Education Core to engage trainees in community research and outreach activities. Through partnership and capacity building, we plan to work collaboratively to create mutually beneficial and sustainable programs with the goal of producing knowledge that may be directly applied to improving community health. Along with our community partners, we plan to develop, implement, and evaluate innovative community engagement and outreach programs with the ultimate goal of reducing health disparities.
Minority populations in the United Sates are disproportionately impacted by morbidity and mortality from cancer and cardiovascular disease. Our objective in the Community Engagement/Outreach Core is to engage African American and African Immigrant communities in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, in health promotion programs to reduce cancer and cardiovascular risk factors.
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